It took no more than a glimpse for John to realize what was happening. His sister Ann was sitting on the floor with her back to her bed, head thrown back and shoulders tensed, eyes shut with a singular expression twisting her mouth into a grimace, smoke rising from the ash tray lying next to her on the far side of the bed. He shut the door softly and continued down the hall. “Man,” he thought as he walked down the hall shaking his head, “it sucks to be fifteen. I bet she pinched Dad’s liquor too.” With his pot out of reach in Ann’s room, and having nothing else to do, John picked up the phone in his room and punched in Albert’s number.
      “Hello? Yeah, this is John… nothing much, just bored… I don’t know man, I don’t think she’ll want to… well, if Tyler was coming sure, but he’s always workin’… at my house? Well, my sister stole my pot… Yeah, that sounds good, we can just hang out and see who shows… Anytime, right now even… excellent, see ya.”
      He hung up the phone and walked to the bathroom. He quickly slapped on some deodorant and some other smelly stuff from the weird bottle, checked his hair, and walked down the hall. Walking past his sister’s room, he was tempted to sneak in and throw the sheets from her bed on top of her, or pull the mattress out from under her head, but he just chuckled at the thought and walked on, banging through the door and walking down the street about a block to Albert’s house. “I hope Albert has some decent pot there, instead of that really cheap stuff he had Tuesday, man that stuff was awful, like inhaling industrial waste, or living in LA.” Albert met him at the door.
      “Hey.”
      “Yeah, just come on through to the garage.”
      John thought to himself that he could probably find the garage with his eyes shut and the full effects of a good hit on him. He and Albert had been friends since elementary school, and they were always at each others houses. Even though he knew the paintings on the wall between the door and the garage well, he always stopped to re-examine them when he passed them. A print of a watercolor by Hopper titled “The Two Lighthouses”, some unsigned landscape, and a copy cat version of an impressionist field of flowers. Albert told John when they were younger that “My parents don’t know the first thing about art, they just buy things they think are pretty at garage sales and hang them in the halls.” Looking at the paintings, John laughed at the vision he had at that instant of Albert’s mom spying a print of something like a flower or a cliff or something and saying “Ooh honey look at this!” and making Albert walk over to listen to her tell him how great it would behind the couch in the den.